Ontology Design for Interaction in a Reasonable Enterprise

Abstract

In this chapter we show a simple example of how different but complementary approaches to enterprise business interaction modeling (e.g., business process management, business objects, e-services, workflow management systems, etc.) can be reengineered and integrated within a same formal context. Our method is based on content ontology design patterns (CODePs), which provide a conceptual tool to build content modularly, and to describe an enterprise and its interactions in the same domain of discourse as its social and informational contexts. The objectives of our method include: (1) encoding the requirements from the communities of practice involved in business interactions; (2) reengineering and integrating existing languages and ontologies for business interaction; (3) creating a formal infrastructure to represent the dependencies between enterprises, social interaction and practices, legal regulations, and the physical world. As a result, entities like organizations, roles, social relationships, material resources, information objects, workflows, events, and so forth, are represented according to a set of modular, interoperable ontologies.